


salt and sky

by lyricalecho



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Boi Friendship, Character Death, Episode 69 spoilers, Gen, Grief, Loss, Post-Canon, secretly a johnmerle fic if you clap your hands and wish real hard, this is specifically in response to magnus's ep 69 character epilogue so.............. you know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-21
Updated: 2018-04-21
Packaged: 2019-04-25 16:43:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14382777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyricalecho/pseuds/lyricalecho
Summary: Merle and Taako learn how to grieve. They are, as with all things, uniquely bad at it.





	salt and sky

**Author's Note:**

> a taz fic that's been a long time coming, and that's taken on a bunch of different forms since - well, basically since last august. i'm posting it on the two-year anniversary of me listening to taz for the first time, though, so apparently the form i settled on was 'the teen titans episode 'things change' but, like, as a podcast fic.' if it speaks to you im very glad! dedicated to a lot of ppl, including e, kaylee, cherry, and elliott, as always, jay for saying he didn't care abt merle, and the sad old men fanclub - sorry this didn't end up being the sad old men fic i thought it was going to be. also to everyone who's been there for me during the very weird past few months. hachi machi, folks.
> 
> title is from 'swim until you can't see land' by frightened rabbit, a song that still makes me cry abt merle every SINGLE time i listen to it, though a lot of it was written while listening to 'if i am dead' by dan mangan. hes valid. thanks

Taako already has a drink in each hand as he heads down the beach towards Merle, which seems a little disrespectful, but what else is new.

"You really had to get us drinks before you even said hello?" says Merle, no real bitterness in it.

"I had to get  _ me _  drinks, homie," says Taako as he settles down in the sand, which is even less surprising. "You live here, go get your own."

"They didn't give them to you for free, did they, because I specifically told them - "

"No, and thank you so much for that." Neither the glass in his hand nor the one he has levitating beside him are drinks Merle recognizes, which means he definitely gave poor Sylva a hell of a time trying to keep up with whatever needlessly complicated recipes he made up on the fly, Merle's going to have to apologize to her later - "You know, this is the only bar in the literal whole of existence that doesn't comp my drinks, never mind the only one that doesn't have a drink named after me, so I don't know where you get off - "

"My town, my bar, I'm the only one who gets things for free. Me and the kids." Merle reaches out for the drink in his hand. "What did you even  _ get _ , anyways, lemme - "

"You fucking dillweed," says Taako, pulling the drink away, and then frowns, and clarifies. "You fucker of dillweeds. I told you, it's mine, back off." He downs nearly half of it in one go, and then, staring straight out at the ocean, he says, "Did Lup tell you to do this?"

Merle knows what he means. He still rubs the back of his head. "...To make you pay for a drink for once?"

"Fuck off," says Taako conversationally. "You know what I meant." (He does; it's them.) "I think after everything happening she feels like I still need to talk about shit, which is so like - it's not like I've ever made a thing about her flouncing off into the astral plane anytime she has a fight with her husband, but I have a moment and suddenly it has to be a whole psychoanalytical production - "

Merle would be inclined to think that 'walking out in the middle of your friend's funeral' is in kind of a separate category from 'having a moment,' but saying that to Taako probably isn't going to get them anywhere. He can keep his mouth shut, when he tries. "Lup didn't ask me to do anything." Taako looks at him sidelong and Merle holds up his hands. "Pan's honest truth, she didn't, do you want me to - "

"If you cast Zone of Truth right now I'm absolutely leaving," Taako says quickly, as Merle puts his hands down. He seems to take a moment, like he always does, to really weigh Merle's credibility; and then, tossing his hair over his shoulder, he says, "So what  _ is _  this about, then."

"I dunno," says Merle. "I just thought like - I wanted to talk about things with just the two of us."

Taako snorts. "We already had a funeral," he points out. "We already had two funerals, and I was there for most of them, which is more funerals than the average person should be expected to deal with, so if you're stuck on turning this into some kind of Matryoshka doll of performative grief then I really, really think I'm good."

Two funerals, Merle presiding over both of them, just like he'd presided over the weeks before, the fight between the other two that Magnus could have taken to his grave if Merle hadn't stepped in. They'd been afraid; they were all afraid. The first funeral was for everybody, but it was the second one that Taako walked out on, the IPRE ceremony that they'd spent a hundred years perfecting, for this. Items they'd gathered placed by his door; a quiet "see you next time"; Taako slipping away without a word. Merle had assumed maybe it had something to do with Lucretia, though some things they still don't talk about - the next time he visited the ship there was the flaming sword, propped against the doorframe like a sentinel. Merle flops backwards onto the sand.

"We're not here for a funeral," he says. "Look at us, we're having drinks on the beach. Well, one of us is drinking. Both of us are on the beach. You don't come to the beach to mourn." Well, most people don't, but most people aren't here at sunset, picturing a face that nobody else - anyways. "I just thought that maybe I could count on you for a little understanding, but fine. Fine." He stretches his arms out, martyred. "Just leave me here. Let the tide come and take me."

"The tide's going out, island boy, but nice try." Merle cracks one eye open. Taako makes no move to leave. The silence between the two of them almost takes the shape of a person. 

Merle makes the first move to fill it, halfway sitting up. "I was thinking the whole time about how upset he would've been to have missed his own funeral."

Taako snorts at it. "Do you remember all the bullshit he used to write back on the Starblaster, that he wanted us to say if he died that year?"

"I don't because he never let me say it! I kept asking Lup to tell me some of it so I could use it in my deeply moving eulogy, but she said it would be insulting to his memory."

"Yeah, because you'd get all the words mixed up," says Taako. "Could you imagine if you called him 'The Screwdriver' instead of 'The Hammer' or whatever? He would've come back to life just to correct you." Merle laughs. "But I think he's - look, _I_ would love to be there for my own funeral. I think Magnus is the kind of person who thinks he would like to be there for his own funeral, but can you imagine Magnus realizing he's responsible for making a hundred people sad? He'd sooner chop off his own arm."

"He offered to, once," Merle tells him. "Thought it might make me feel better about - " He nods down at his side, the ache in his elbow that still finds him at the end of the day.

"Fucking of course he did." Taako tilts his head backwards. "Goddamn idiot moron. Dense as a stack of bricks and better than the lot of us." 

"Pan love him," says Merle, and Taako polishes off his first drink in response. "I think that might be what's fucking me up the most, after everything. Like - like we did all that heroic shit together, and I always assumed we were kind of settled up on being decent people, but now - with him gone - like, it feels like we're okay at  _doing_  good, but I'm not sure I really know - "

" - how to  _ be _  good," Taako finishes, like he already knows. He still doesn't look over, but his hand is tense against the sand. "You think this is how regular people do it?"

"Be good?"

"Be anything, I mean, like, sit on a beach and think about shit, and not overthrow a governor, or become a unkillable energy ghost, or turn all their friends into brainless chess puppets - do they just, like,  _ deal _ ? Are we  _ dealing _ , Merle?"

"I don't know if we're doing a very good job of it if we are," Merle says.

Taako laughs, a little bitterly, as he takes a long first gulp of his second drink. The silence stretches out another beat, and then he says, "It's just - I mean, what's even the fucking point?"

"Sorry?"

"Like, all that - you do all that, and what, then you just die? Like it's just over? I mean, I know we've had the most busted imaginable relationship to mortality for a couple hundred years now, but like - what the fuck is even the point of any of it then?"

It's more than Merle was expecting out of Taako today, maybe more than he expects out of Taako ever; they've all been circling the same questions for weeks now, but Taako - well. Everyone kind of expected Taako to fully commit to the 'walking out on a funeral' kind of approach. He's still almost waiting for him to backpedal as he asks, "You looking for an answer?"

"Only if you don't give me any fake-zen garbage." He hasn't been looking at Merle for a while yet but now he turns accusingly. "I can tell when you're bullshitting me, Highchurch. You know that."

He knows. For a moment, something is familiar -  _ to exist, to live is horrible _  - but he leaves it for now. "What's the first thing you remember about him? Not - the earliest thing, just the first thing that comes to mind that makes you feel something."

"See, this is exactly what I said I - are you practicing bits on me for your youth group because I did just bare my soul a little here and if this was a setup - "

"Look, you want my help or not? Just tell me. I won't make fun of you, this is a beach of safety."

Taako downs the rest of his drink in several very slow sips but still doesn't leave, which feels like some kind of victory. Finally, he says, "You remember when we were in that well? After we definitely accidentally destroyed a town and got Barry killed before we knew he was Barry?"

"Boy, we're bad at everything, huh."

"Oh, just the worst," Taako agrees. "But something about - I don't know, about who I thought I was back then? Or about all of us, before we knew we were anybody? We were just three idiots who got stuck in a well, and he'd still been trying to help people, and I just remember being there and feeling - whatever. I don't know. There's my contribution to your sharing circle, I guess. It's called 'One Time Three Idiots Got Stuck In A Well.'"

"And that's something good that happened?"

"Well, like, a hundred people died, Merle, so no, not exactly - "

"No, I know there's that, but I mean - there's a moment in your life that felt better because he was there."

"Yuck." Taako sticks out his tongue, the way he usually does with his sister. "But sure."

Merle flops back onto the sand. "Well. There you go."

"What the - is that  it ? Do you charge people for this? That's all the sage earthly godgiven beach wisdom you have to offer me, your best friend by process of elimination, in my time of need?"

"You asked what the point was, right?" says Merle. "I'm saying that's the point. You give somebody something. You leave them a memory, you bring them joy, you help them out when they need it - or when they're too stubborn to admit they need it - and that sticks. Even if you're not intergalactic heroes like us, even if nobody remembers you for it, even if it's only one person, I mean, that's a pretty sad life, but you get the gist, right? You make someone feel better when they wouldn't have without you and that's a reason for you to be here. You've done something that mattered to someone. That's the point."

"Criminy, you're such a dad," says Taako. "I can't believe there was ever a time where I didn't know you were a dad. You, like, ooze dad energy." There's a soft chime, and the stone of farspeech at his hip lights up. "Whoop - hang on," he says, and stands up and chucks the stone fully into the ocean.

"...Uh," says Merle.

"Okay, so, thinking on it, that probably wasn't positive coping behavior." He sits down and lies back in the sand, propping himself on his elbows beside Merle. "I know it's not - I don't want to be the one who's making this all about me. Especially now that there's one less person in the world to tolerate that particular bullshit from me. But it's - like - there's something we all had and there's something the world had and there's something that we had, the three of us, and I still don't know what that was but - I think maybe I need to. Before I can talk about it."

Merle knows; he's been thinking about it since even before it happened. Maybe a thousand years between all of them and somehow the one he never forgets is theirs: the three of them and the one story they told themselves, their shared, impossible, unforgettable year. He wonders if part of the reason it's all such a mess is that out of all of them Magnus would be best equipped to deal with something like this. Taako had his sister, gone and forgotten and remembered and returned; Merle has a name he never speaks and a face only he would ever know. Magnus lost someone like a normal person, and now there's no one to tell them what to do. He never had funeral rites for John; they're all just fumbling in the dark as they go.

"You remember the three of us," Merle asks, "at the end, when we saved the world?"

"Charging into the dark," Taako says. "Like absolute tools."

"Oh, a hundred percent tools," says Merle. "But the sun'll be up tomorrow, because of him. Think that counts for something." He glances over at Taako, staring out over the sea. "I think we did alright by him, in the end."

"Mmm," says Taako, softly, only the slightest hint of a waver in it.

Merle breathes in and out slowly, the air of the only place he feels at home; closes his eyes and remembers another beach, out of time. There's a lot they could have done better, but maybe they were worth it still.

"You wanna sit with me?" he says to Taako, hearing the echo in it, the closest he's come to describing the moment in years. "Just watch this together?"

Taako looks at him, with something almost like gratitude, and nods. One last funeral: for him, for all of them, for the three of them as they were. Someday they'll all be forgotten, and the good will win out in the end.

And the sun goes down to the sea.


End file.
